It’s clearly a problem if all the change is occurring outside your area of expertise, but what about experts in their own field, who must cope with growing and changing information? Well, in a great paper from nearly two decades ago, Nicholas Christakis explored this for physicians and medical knowledge. Christakis, a professor at Harvard University (and my postdoctoral advisor), examined proposals for medical education reform going all the way back to 1910, and found that nearly every proposal recognized the problem of trying to “cope with burgeoning knowledge”:

While medicine has changed quite a bit over the Twentieth Century, dealing with medical knowledge has not: